BRADLEY MANNING: AN AMERICAN HERO

WRITTEN BY OMAR_GAZA

US, August 8, (Pal Telegraph – By Stephen Lendman) Manning, of course, is the courageous Army intelligence analyst turned whistleblower, who admitted leaking:

-- "260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables and video of a (US) airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year," and

-- an "explosive (39 minute) video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the Reuters news agency" - "collateral murder" he felt obligated to expose.

It got him in trouble. On June 7, the military in Iraq arrested him, saying:

"The Department of Defense takes the management of classified information very seriously because it affects our national security, the lives of our soldiers, and our operations abroad."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the leak "potentially dramatic and grievously harmful....The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that part of the world. Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries."

Unmentioned was the following:

-- our attack, invasion and occupation are illegal under US and international law;

-- war crimes, including murder, torture, and targeted assassinations happen daily;

-- civilian men, women, and children are willfully targeted;

-- since October 2001, millions of Afghans have been killed, injured or displaced, their country perhaps the most hellish anyway, devastated by decades of war, deep poverty, depravation, and unimaginable human suffering, mostly caused by America;

-- the same holds for Iraq, Pakistan, and nations where Washington wages proxy wars; and

-- our presence and imperial aims cause harm, not Manning or WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, exposing truths the public has a right and need to know.

They deserve praise, not prosecutions, compliments, not condemnation, and accolades, not accusations. They're heros, risking personal harm to disclose disturbing truths, what government and media reports suppress, sanitize and distort, letting warlords plunder lawlessly so war profiteers can cash in, Americans the worse off for it.

In his August 4 Anti-Empire Report (www.killinghope.org), author William Blum asked:

"So please tell me again: What's the war about?" Lies, of course, about 9/11 and leaders repeating them, Obama for one last August 17 saying:

"But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans."

On July 28, 2010, he lied again, saying: "the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been planned."

Rubbish according to Blum, saying:

"Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001."

"The only 'war of necessity' that draws the United States to Afghanistan is the need for protected oil and gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea area, (and) establishment of military bases (there), making it easier to watch and pressure next-door Iran (besides being a land-based aircraft carrier to target Russia and China). What more could any respectable imperialist nation desire? Oh, did I mention that the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex and its shareholders" will profit handsomely.

In 1996, America helped the Taliban gain power, funneling military aid through Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence). Oil was the hidden agenda, Taliban representatives visiting Unocal in Houston in December 1997 to negotiate a trans-Afghan pipeline from the oil rich Caspian area. It was nearly agreed, the kicker being America's refusal to extend recognition, a small courtesy to avoid war, occupation, and a deepening unwinnable quagmire.

On December 14, 1997, London's Daily Telegraph reported:

"the US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban's policies against women and children 'despicable,' appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract."

On December 4, 1997, a BBC correspondent said "the proposal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea."

By recognizing the Taliban government, it would have been built and today's quagmire avoided. Perhaps America's graveyard also, no invader ever occupying Afghanistan successfully, not the Soviets or British, the UK government suffering its greatest ever slaughter and defeat in 1842, losing 16,000 soldiers and civilians, except one man, historians believing Afghans let him live to recount the horror. As a result, Britain withdrew all its personnel and left, a lesson now forgotten, about 9,500 UK troops deployed with Americans and other NATO forces.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai was a former Unocal adviser when pipeline negotiations took place. He was also a CIA asset. Unocal claimed it abandoned the pipeline project. Secret talks, however, continued up to a few months before 9/11, Taliban representatives visiting the State Department, CIA, and National Security Council. They even had a Queens, New York diplomatic office, and US officials visited Taliban ones in Islamabad.

The French newspaper Le Figaro also quoted Arab specialist Antoine Sfeir, saying CIA operatives met with bin Laden (a CIA asset in the 1980s) and maintained contact with him until his training camp was attacked in 1998.

America's fine line between enemies and friends is their willingness or reluctance to obey - do what we say or we'll boycott or bomb you, a threat with teeth, revealed by Manning and WikiLeaks.

Revealing Disturbing Truths Is Risky

Held initially in Kuwait, a July 29 Baghdad Pentagon press release said:

"US Army officials transferred PFC Bradley Manning from the Theater Field Confinement Facility in Kuwait to the Marine Corps Base Quantico Brig in Quantico, Virginia, on July 29. (He) remains in pretrial confinement pending an Article 32 investigation (like a grand jury or preliminary hearing) into the charges preferred against him on July 5."

"The criminal investigation remains open....findings and recommendations (will determine) whether to recommend (if) the case (will) be referred to trial by court-martial." For sure, that's what's planned, the Pentagon and Obama administration to throw the book at him or worse unless somehow their plans are derailed.

On August 2, Congressman Mike Rogers (R. MI) told Michigan radio station WHMI that Manning should be executed, saying:

"He release(d) this information to a third party who they say will make the determination that there's nothing harmful in it, while we know for a fact that there will be people that will likely be killed because of this information being disclosed. That's pretty serious. If they don't charge him with treason, they ought to charge him with murder."

Asked if he should be punished by death, Rogers said: "Yes, and I would support it 100 percent."

Federal Charges Against Manning

In early July, the Pentagon charged him with four noncriminal offenses, and eight violations of federal criminal law, including one count of violating the 1917 Espionage Act, accessed through the following link:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/07/06/us-will-press-crimin.html#more

Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) charges included:

-- eight violations of federal criminal law, including unauthorized computer access and transmitting classified information to an unauthorized third party; and

-- four noncriminal Army regulations violations, governing the handling of classified information and computers.

If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 52 years in prison.

The Bradley Manning Support Network

Access it for information about Manning through the following link:

http://www.bradleymanning.org/

Its purpose is to:

-- "Harness the outrage felt by millions (viewing) the 'Collateral Murder' video into a coordinated defense of Manning;

-- Raise awareness" about his arrest, charges and likely court-martial;

-- "Coordinate" efforts to support him;

-- "Collect funds (for a) high-quality" defense;

-- "Provide supporters with accurate, updated information as the" pretrial hearing and likely trial progress; and

-- "Provide prisoner support for (him) throughout his imprisonment."

Connected with Assange, he's more vulnerable, a 2008 classified Counterintelligence Center report placing WikiLeaks on "the list of enemies threatening the security of the United States," discussing ways to destroy its reputation and effectiveness, saying:

"Web sites such as WikiLeaks.org have trust as their most important center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insider, leaker, or whistleblower. Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to WikiLeaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions."

With Manning in custody and facing trial, score one for the Pentagon, expected to exploit his case to the fullest to set an example and deter others. He'll likely be convicted and imprisoned, not executed as Congressman Rogers wants.

Law Professor Francis Boyle "believe(s) a treason charge wo(n't) stick (because) Congress has not declared war." The best outcome for military resisters he helped defend was to "get them off of prison time, out of the military, or else minimum time served." He and others also got Amnesty International to designate Capt. Dr. Huett Vaughn, Staff Sgt. Mejia, and Lt. Ehren Watada Prisoners of Conscience (POC).

Watada was the first commissioned officer refusing to deploy to Iraq, saying: "as an officer of honor and integrity, (he could not participate in a war that was) manifestly illegal....morally wrong (and) a horrible breach of American law."

As a result, he faced court-martial, a possible dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and seven years in prison, but got off thanks to Boyle and others. Before his Article 32 hearing, he publicly called the war illegal. Not wanting that revealed in testimony, the presiding judge declared a mistrial. He'd lost control, knew Watada was right, and had to suppress the truth to avoid an acquittal possibility on constitutional grounds.

Afghanistan is also illegal, Boyle explaining that Congress never declared war. The UN Security never authorized it under Article 51, and the Taliban never "attacked the United States or authorized or approved such an attack." In public testimony, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and CIA's then Deputy Director John McLaughlin admitted finding no link between the Taliban and 9/11.

Nonetheless, the Bush administration preemptively attacked in violation of US and international law. Obama is a war criminal pursuing and escalating it, expanding it cross border into Pakistan, and continuing the Iraq conflict and occupation.

American forces may refuse to serve, citing US and international law, including Army Field Manual (FM) 27 - 10, incorporating the Nuremberg Principles, Judgment and Charter and The Law of Land Warfare (1956).

FM's paragraph 498 states that any person, military or civilian, who commits a crime under international law is responsible for it and may be punished. Paragraph 499 defines a war crime. Paragraph 500 refers to a conspiracy, attempts to commit it and complicity with respect to international crimes. Paragraph 509 denies the defense of superior orders in the commission of a crime, and paragraph 510 denies the defense of an "act of state" to absolve them.

These provisions apply to all US military and civilian personnel, including top commanders, the Secretary of Defense, his subordinates, and the President and Vice President. Boyle calls resisting lawlessness "our Nuremberg moment." Those refusing them and exposing crimes should be praised, not prosecuted.

Manning provided evidence and may denounce the war's illegality, perhaps using it as a defense. He found crimes, needing to be exposed, acting honorably and heroically doing it as did WikiLeaks by publishing them anonymously. 

In edited chat logs posted by Wired.com, Manning admitted "want(ing) people to see the truth....regardless of who they are....because without information, you cannot make informed decisions...." He never considered selling it to foreign powers or anyone, saying: "information should be free....it belongs in the public domain....if it's out in the open....it should be a public good," exposing crimes and corruption to generate "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms."

That's honor, not espionage or treason, Manning saying:

"Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal (to) be revealed. World-wide anarchy in CVS format. It's Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It's beautiful and horrifying. (The documents describe) almost criminal political back dealings. (They belong) in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark corner in Washington, DC (or the Pentagon. Our government is involved in) incredible things, awful things."

He exposed cold-blooded civilian murders, the public unaware that Pentagon rules-of-engagement (ROEs) target them like combatants in every warfare theater. Waging permanent wars of aggression, America acts lawlessly and recklessly. The public has a right to know. Manning and Assange are heros, deserving plaudits for their courage.

A Final Note

On Sunday, August 8, a public rally will be held outside the Quantico, VA Marine base, supporting Manning. War criminals remain free uncharged. Manning, an American hero, faces 52 years in prison for exposing their crimes.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

SUNDAY, 08 AUGUST

Source : http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/

Missing the forest

Does anyone actually know the meaning of the term 'Jewish state'? Wouldn't it be better to live in a just democracy?

By Gideon Levy

Sometimes you really can't see the forest for the trees. The forest of political, governmental and institutional racism in Israel is dark and deep. One particular tree in that forest happens to have Israelis all riled up: The state's handling of the children of migrant workers. In the shade of a nearby tree is the state's handling of these children's parents, but this excites the Israelis somewhat less. And there are many other poisonous trees in the forest: Citizenship laws, loyalty laws, conversion laws, the razing of Bedouin villages in the Negev and even the story of the Arab delivery man who was convicted of rape for pretending to be a Jew. Each one galvanized parts of society into action, and this is well and good; but few see the big picture, and the big picture is several times worse than the sum of its components.

Enlightenment came from an unexpected direction; it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of all people, who accurately defined the problem. In deciding on these children's future, he said, the cabinet is torn between humanitarian considerations on one hand and Zionist considerations on the other. The prime minister of Israel himself presents them as a contradiction, and this is the story in a nutshell.

Each particular wrong must be fought, of course, but we must not forget that all comes down to one large, fundamental truth: Defining Israel as a Jewish state condemns us to living in a racist state. This is the new definition of Zionism that we have subscribed to, and until we realize that we will not be able to uproot all the wild weeds that have seeded themselves here lately. Were we to not expel the migrant workers' children but continue to raze Bedouin villages we would not solve a thing. We will continue to move from one injustice to another until we recognize the racist nature of the state.

Israel is not the only place where racism is on the rise. Europe and the United States are awash in a turbid wave of xenophobia; but in Israel, this racism is embedded in the state's most fundamental values. There is no other state whose immigration laws are blatantly and unequivocally based on the candidates' bloodlines. Jewish blood, whether authentic or dubious, is kosher. Other blood, from those of other creeds or nationalities, is unacceptable. No country throws its doors wide open to everyone, but while other states take social, economic and cultural considerations into account in Israel bloodline is the name of the game. How else are we to understand the fact that someone who was born here, who speaks the language, cherishes its values and even serves in the military, can be unceremoniously expelled while a member of the Bnei Menashe community in India or the grandson of a half-Jew from Kazakhstan are welcomed with open arms.

In contrast to what we have been told there is no significant argument in the wider world, and of course not in Israel, over the Jews' right to a state. The argument is about its character. There is also no argument about the justice of the Law of Return: Israel is the place of the Jews who want to live there. The real argument is over the law's exclusivity, over the fact that it applies only to Jews. That's where it all begins. One could understand the need after the Holocaust, the necessity in the first years of the state, but 62 years after the founding of the state the time has come to reexamine the long-obsolete concepts.

Does anyone actually know the meaning of the term "Jewish state" that we bandy about so much? Does it mean a state for Jews only? Is it not a new kind of "racial purity"? Is the "demographic threat" greater than the danger of the state's becoming a religious enthnocracy or an apartheid state? Wouldn't it be better to live in a just democracy? And how is it even possible to speak about a state being both Jewish and democratic? But anyone who tries to enter the cauldron of this debate, who tries to think outside the box of tired cliche, is automatically fated to delegitimization and slander. Just ask Avraham Burg, who last week announced his intention to set up a political party along those very lines.

Source : http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/missing-the-forest-1.306647

Knocks On The Door

It’s The Newspaper Boy

The peril of having your words rendered suspect and aired nationally

ARUNDHATI ROY

While the Indian government considers deploying the army and air force to quell the rebellion in the countryside, strange things are happening in the cities. On June 2, the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights held a public meeting in Mumbai. The main speakers were Gautam Navlakha, editorial consultant of the Economic and Political Weekly, and myself. The press was there in strength. The meeting lasted for more than three hours. It was widely covered by the print media and TV. On June 3, several newspapers, TV channels and online news portals like rediff.com covered the event quite accurately. The Times of India (Mumbai edition) had an article headlined ‘We need an idea that is neither Left nor Right’, and the Hindu’s article was headlined ‘Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?’ The recording of the meeting is up on YouTube.


The day after the meeting, PTI put out a brazenly concocted account of what I had said. The PTI report was first posted by the Indian Express online on June 3 at 1.35 pm. The headline said: ‘Arundhati backs Maoists, dares authorities to arrest her’.


Here are some excerpts:


“Author Arundhati Roy has justified the armed resistance by Maoists and dared the authorities to arrest her for supporting their cause. ‘The Naxal movement could be nothing but an armed struggle. I am not supporting violence. But I am also completely against contemptuous atrocities-based political analysis. It ought to be an armed movement. Gandhian way of opposition needs an audience, which is absent here. People have debated long before choosing this form of struggle,’ said Roy, who had saluted the ‘people of Dantewada’ after 76 CRPF and police personnel were mowed down by Maoists in the deadliest attack targeting security forces. ‘I am on this side of line. I do not care...pick me up put me in jail,’ she asserted.”


Let me begin with the end of the report. The suggestion that I saluted the “people of Dantewada” after the Maoists killed 76 CRPF and police personnel is a piece of criminal defamation. I have made it quite clear in an interview on CNN-IBN that I viewed the death of the CRPF men as tragic, and that I thought they were pawns in a war of the rich against the poor. What I said at the meeting in Mumbai was that I was contemptuous of the hollow condemnation industry the media has created and that as the war went on and the violence spiralled, it was becoming impossible to extract any kind of morality from the atrocities committed by both sides, so an atrocity-based analysis was a meaningless exercise. I said that I was not there to defend the killing of ordinary people by anybody, neither the Maoists nor the government, and that it was important to ask what the CRPF was doing with 27 AK-47s, 38 INSAS, 7 SLRs, 6 light machine guns, one stengun and a two-inch mortar in tribal villages. If they were there to wage war, then being railroaded into condemning the killing of the CRPF men by the Maoists meant being railroaded into coming down on the side of the government in a war that many of us disagreed with.

The rest of the PTI report was a malicious, moronic mish-mash of what transpired at the meeting. My views on the Maoists are clear. I have written at length about them. At the meeting, I said that the people’s resistance against the corporate land grab consisted of a bandwidth of movements with different ideologies, of which the Maoists were the most militant end. I said the government was labelling every resistance movement, every activist, ‘Maoist’ in order to justify dealing with them in repressive, military fashion. I said the government had expanded the meaning of the word ‘Maoist’ to include everybody who disagreed with it, anybody who dared to talk about justice. I drew attention to the people of Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur who were waging peaceful protests but were living under siege, surrounded by hundreds of armed police, were being lathicharged and fired at. I said that local people thought long and hard before deciding what strategy of resistance to adopt. I spoke of how people who lived deep inside forest villages could not resort to Gandhian forms of protest because peaceful satyagraha was a form of political theatre that in order to be effective, needed a sympathetic audience, which they did not have. I asked how people who were already starving could go on hunger strikes. I certainly never said anything like “it ought to be an armed movement”. (I’m not sure what on earth that means.)

I went on to say that all the various resistance movements today, regardless of their differences, understood they were fighting a common enemy, so they were all on one side of the line, and that I stood with them. But from this side of the line, instead of only asking the government questions, we should ask ourselves some questions. 


Here are my exact words:


“I think it is much more interesting to interrogate the resistance to which we belong, I am on this side of the line. I am very clear about that. I don’t care, pick me up, put me in jail. I am on this side of the line. But on this side of the line, we must turn around and ask our comrades questions.”


I then said that while Gandhian methods of resistance were not proving effective, Gandhian movements like the Narmada Bachao Andolan had a radical and revolutionary vision of “development” and while the Maoists’ methods of resistance were effective, I wondered whether they had thought through the kind of “development” they wanted. Apart from the fact that they were against the government selling out to private corporations, was their mining policy very different from state policy? Would they leave the bauxite in the mountain—which is what the people who make up their cadre want—or would they mine it when they came to power? I read out Pablo Neruda’s Standard Oil Company that tells us what an old battle this one is.


The PTI reporter who had made it a point to take permission from the organisers to record cannot claim his or her version to be a matter of ‘interpretation’. It is blatant falsification. Surprisingly, the one-day-old report was published by several newspapers and broadcast by TV channels on June 4, many of whose own reporters had covered the event accurately the previous day and obviously knew the report to be false. The Economic Times said: “Publicity-seeking Arundhati Roy wants to be Aung San Suu Kyi”. I’m curious—why would newspapers and TV channels want to publish the same news twice, once truthfully and then falsely?


That same evening, at about seven, two men on a motorcycle drove up to my home in Delhi and began hurling stones at the window. One stone nearly hit a small child playing on the street. Angry people gathered and the men fled.


Within minutes, a Tata Indica arrived with a man who claimed to be a reporter from Zee TV, asking if this was “Arundhati Roy’s house” and whether there had been trouble. Clearly, this was a set-up, a staged display of ‘popular anger’ to be fed to our barracuda-like TV channels. Fortunately for me, that evening their script went wrong. But there was more to come. On June 5, the Dainik Bhaskar in Raipur carried a news item “Himmat ho to AC kamra chhod kar jungle aaye Arundhati (if she has the guts, Arundhati should leave her air-conditioned room and come to the jungle)” in which Vishwa Ranjan, the director general of police of Chhattisgarh, challenged me to face the police by joining the Maoists in the forest. Imagine that—the police DGP and me, Man to Man. Not to be outdone, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Chhattisgarh, Ms Poonam Chaturvedi, announced to the press that I should be shot down at a public crossroad, and that other traitors like me should be given the death sentence. (Perhaps someone should tell her that this sort of direct incitement to violence is an offence under the Indian Penal Code.) Mahendra Karma, chief of the murderous ‘people’s’ militia, the Salwa Judum, which is guilty of innumerable acts of rape and murder, asked for legal action to be taken against me. On Tuesday, June 8, Hindi daily Nayi Duniya reported that complaints have been filed against me in two separate police stations in Chhattisgarh, Bhata Pada and Teli Bandha, by private individuals objecting to my “open support for the Maoists”.


Is this what Military Intelligence calls psyops (psychological operations)? Or is it the urban avatar of Operation Green Hunt? In which a government news agency helps the home ministry to build up a file on those it wants to put away, inventing evidence when it can’t find any? Or is PTI trying to deliver the more well-known among us to the lynch mob so that the government does not have to risk its international reputation by arresting or eliminating us? Or is it just a way of forcing a crude polarisation, a ridiculous dumbing down of the debate—if you’re not with “us”, you are a Maoist? Not just a Maoist, but a stupid, arrogant, loud-mouthed Maoist. Whatever it is, it’s dangerous, and shameless, but it isn’t new. Ask any Kashmiri, or any young Muslim being held as a “terrorist” without any evidence except baseless media reports. Ask Mohammed Afzal, sentenced to death to “satisfy the collective conscience of society”.


Now that Operation Green Hunt has begun to knock on the doors of people like myself, imagine what’s happening to activists and political workers who are not well known. To the hundreds who are being jailed, tortured and eliminated. June 26 is the 35th anniversary of the Emergency. Perhaps the Indian people should declare (because the government certainly won’t) that this country is in a state of Emergency. (On second thoughts, did it ever go away?) This time censorship is not the only problem. The manufacture of news is an even more serious one.

Source :  http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?265790